"Multispecies Justice for Defending Artic Alaska"

Subhankar Banerjee will give a talk titled “Multispecies Justice For Defending Arctic Alaska.” Banerjee articulates photography and scholarship to raise issues of Arctic conservation, human rights, resource development and climate change. In this public lecture, Banerjee presents his visual and intellectual work resulting from his decade-long commitment to protect the Alaskan Arctic.

He has said, “In late 2000, when I first started to plan my journey to the Arctic, I used to think of the land as untouched by man, a so-called 'Last Frontier.' After six years of intense engagement with the land, its peoples and its issues, I see the Arctic not as a last frontier but as the most connected land on the planet. This connection is both celebratory— millions of birds from every land on the planet migrate to the Arctic each year for nesting and rearing their young, a planetary celebration of epic scale—and tragic, as resource wars (oil, coal, mineral), global warming and toxic migrations have in turn connected the Arctic to the lives of people in faraway lands in a rather tragic manner too.”

This event is free and open to the public, and is sponsored by the Department of Political Science at Amherst College, with funding support from the Lamont Funds.

Banerjee is the Lannan Foundation Endowed Chair of Land Arts of the American West and professor of art and ecology at the University of New Mexico. Banerjee, “once a physicist,” is an Indian-born American photographer, writer, activist and environmental humanities scholar. He has been a leading voice on issues of Arctic conservation, indigenous human rights, resource wars and climate change. He has also done work in the American Southwest that addresses desert ecology and forest deaths from climate change, and recently started a project to address climate change impacts and politics of ecology in the coastal temperate rainforests in the Pacific Northwest. His research focuses on the intersection of art, ecocultural activism and environmental humanities. His photographs, writing and lectures have reached millions of people around the world.